Faith And Art Quotes

Personally, I think Jesus would like better bands.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

When you grow up being taught to worship, whatever that means, there is an array of body-rich symbols: tears, blood, crucifixion, the stations of the cross, transubstantiation... Faith is a belief in something that is irrational, and so to have faith, there is some correlation there with the belief in the art.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

I think that if you are going to be successful as a Christian in the arts, you have to be successful in your Christian life.

I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age - seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.

Christians who enjoy and support art and culture, who make it a priority in their lives, and who reach out to those in the arts instead of reflexively pushing them away, can help bring the culture toward a renewed appreciation of goodness, truth, and beauty. And that is good for everyone.

Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.

What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.

My interest in art must have started with my Catholic upbringing. Art was everywhere: churches with its paintings, sculptures, stained glass, textiles, and fine metalwork.

I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.

... at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.

The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

I'm a Baha'i; we really believe in Baha'i faith that our work has to be our service, especially in the arts.

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

There was a time when I was fighting with the decision as to whether or not a Hasidic man could go out and have a music career in the world and be involved in pop culture. For me, I was able to bring those two things together for quite some time.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

I write because it makes God happy that I write. I sing because it makes God happy that I sing. And if it makes God's people happy, then all the better. But if it fails to do so, it's probably my fault.

For some reason, we have completely separated Christians who are rappers, and we have separated, I guess, regular rappers. I feel that we should be able to mingle, enjoy each other's company, and trade ideas.

My whole childhood was church. But as an adult, I've grown to understand my relationship with God versus how I sing. People in church are like, 'You sing the devil's music,' but I believe in balance. I can't just party with you. I got to help you, too.

I believe that in a certain way this is proof of the truth of Christianity: Heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge, and the more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth, the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too, and to express itself in a convincing form of art.

Intellectuals and creative people, once they start talking about God they get put into this other category: 'I don't go to people's music like that to understand my life.'

Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how beautiful it was.

As evangelical Christians we have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life. The rest of human life we feel is more important. Despite our constant talk about the Lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality.